blog 4

Another Christmas and New Year gone and a lot of turkey, roast potatoes, gravy, stuffing, red wine, Christmas pudding, mince pies, lager, chocolate, port, Christmas cake, stollen, white wine, brussel sprouts, cranberry sauce, champagne and wafer-thin-fuckoffimfull-mints have flowed under the bridge - stretching already stretched stomachs to bursting point. Like everyone else I was out on 2nd January waddling down the supermarket isles with eyes only for the salads on offer and swearing to get into that suit that fitted me perfectly three years ago.

Christmas is brilliant in Britain - it's like being wrapped in a huge, warm, red blanket - you can't escape it and this year with raw memories of working Christmas Day in Al Ain last December that was just fine. The British do traditional Christmas properly - no half measures, the whole hog. It's like being slowly crushed under booze, sugar and presents until at the end you are struggling for air and hate Christmas, yourself and humanity in general. Such frenzied consumption is repulsive. When it's over you want to find those websites promoting anorexia as a lifestyle choice.

This situation was possibly made worse by having two Christmases - one in England with Sarah's folks and the other in Ireland with mine. Evil soda bread (the heroin of Ireland), evil Guinness, evil full English and full Irish breakfasts. The dogs were left for a few days in a kennel that bore worrying similarities to the workhouse in Oliver Twist. 'Well dogs you'll be just fine here on this concrete floor with no heating or light and a hundred dogs barking like crazy for five days won't you? Quick run to the car!' They were only mildly traumatised by the experience in my view and Nog has almost lost the stutter in his bark.

Today was one of those long country walks we have done with fantastic New Year resolve. We all ended up in knee high mud at the end of a country lane in search of a long barrow. Tom, who has been fantasizing about recreating First World War trench warfare for his eleventh birthday in September for some reason, was crying as I had to drag him out of a muddy morass under rusting barbed wire and into a crop field where we could make our escape. Our garden already vaguely resembles Pashendale what with clay soil, inches of rain and dogs, but that country lane was something else.

Anyway, Christmas was brilliant and can't wait for next year.